Skip to Main Content

Electrify Chicago

According to the 2022 Chicago Climate Action Plan(opens in a new tab), a whopping 69% of Chicago's emissions come from buildings, making it our biggest challenge and our biggest opportunity as a city to tackle change. At Electrify Chicago we want to showcase some of the best and worst performing buildings in the city using publicly available data and manual annotations to add building photographs and label multi-building owners like universities.

You can start by looking at Chicago's buildings with the highest greenhouse gas intensity - this means that they use the most energy when adjusted per unit of square foot, so big buildings could actually perform much better than very inefficient small buildings on this metric.

Chicago Buildings by Greenhouse Gas Intensity

Note: Data only includes large Chicago buildings from 2020

Note: This data only includes buildings whose emissions are reported under the Chicago Energy Benchmarking Ordinance(opens in a new tab). According to the City β€œAs of 2016, this list includes all commercial, institutional, and residential buildings larger than 50,000 square feet.” This dataset is also then filtered to only buildings with reported emissions > 1,000 metric tons CO2 equivalent.

This data is also from 2020, but when new benchmark data is available, we'll update the site.

Property Name / address Primary Property Type Greenhouse Gas Intensity
(kg CO2 eq./sqft)
Total Greenhouse Emissions
(metric tons CO2 eq.)
Crown Hall
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3360 S State Street
College/University
555.1 kg/sqft
#1 Highest
30,139 tons
#7 Highest
CH1
🚨 πŸ“·
427 S LaSalle St
Data Center
119.5 kg/sqft
#2 Highest
19,115 tons
#21 Highest
600-780 S Federal St
🚨 πŸ“·
600 S Federal St
Data Center
101.9 kg/sqft
#3 Highest
18,871 tons
#22 Highest
Tech Business Center
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3440 S Dearborn Street
College/University
89.3 kg/sqft
#4 Highest
12,570 tons
#45 Highest
Herman Hall
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3241 S Federal Street
College/University
88.9 kg/sqft
#5 Highest
9,884 tons
Highest 3%
Life Sciences Research Building
🚨
(Illinois Tech)
35 W 34th Street
College/University
80.7 kg/sqft
#6 Highest
8,317 tons
Highest 3%
Keating Hall
🚨 πŸ“·
(Illinois Tech)
3040 S Wabash Avenue
College/University
69.5 kg/sqft
#7 Highest
3,694 tons
Highest 10%
6045 Kenwood Building
🚨 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
6045 S Kenwood Ave
Office
69.4 kg/sqft
#8 Highest
6,886 tons
Highest 4%
601 West Polk
🚨
601 W Polk Street
Data Center
65.7 kg/sqft
#9 Highest
6,829 tons
Highest 5%
William Eckhardt Research Center (ERC)
🚨 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
5640 S ELLIS AVE
Laboratory
54.3 kg/sqft
#10 Highest
15,454 tons
#32 Highest
Salem Baptist Church of Chicago
🚩
10909 S Cottage Grove Ave
Worship Facility
52.6 kg/sqft
#11 Highest
4,830 tons
Highest 7%
Searle Chemistry Laboratory
🚩 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
5735 S Ellis Ave
Laboratory
47.4 kg/sqft
#12 Highest
4,052 tons
Highest 9%
Gordon Center for Integrative Science (GCIS)
🚩 πŸ“·
(UChicago)
929 E 57th St
Laboratory
41.8 kg/sqft
#13 Highest
20,053 tons
#16 Highest
McGowan North
🚩
(DePaul)
2325 N Clifton Ave
College/University
39.7 kg/sqft
#14 Highest
2,224 tons
Highest 20%
Pete's Pulaski
🚩
4343 S Pulaski Rd
Supermarket/Grocery Store
36.0 kg/sqft
#15 Highest
2,014 tons
Highest 22%
Page 1 of 171 (Building #1 to #15)

Data Source: Chicago Energy Benchmarking Data (opens in a new tab)